Abstract

The vast address space of IPv6 makes it impractical to apply exhaustive scanning to survey the entire network. Existing studies that aim to quickly discover active IPv6 addresses by optimizing the scanning space face issues of poor scalability and high time complexity, which hinder a comprehensive understanding of the IPv6 network and impede the timely provision of security snapshots and the development of IPv6. Fortunately, the emergence of programmable switches provides an opportunity to address the above issues. To this end, we propose 6Map, a fast active IPv6 address discovery system based on programmable switches. We design a lightweight target generation algorithm running on the control plane of the programmable switch and implement fast scanning address generation on the switch ASIC. The experimental results show that IPv6 active address discovery efficiency is up to 40.1\(\times\) compared to the state-of-the-art method at the 100M probe budget.

Note

This paper hasn’t been published yet.

Recommended citation: J. Zhou, L. He, Y. Yang, X. Shi, D. Cheng, J. E,, Y. Liu, & D. Zhang. 2025. "6Map: Enabling fast active IPv6 address discovery with programmable switches". In Proceedings of the 44th IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM). London, United Kingdom.